To Eat, Per Chance to Dream

This will be short since Saturday is my singular day of rest and though the desire to stare at a computer screen is a virulent sirens' song I will attempt to flee nonetheless.

Yesterday I was too busy to escape on a long, well deserved lunch break, but there was a sign posted in the ladies room with grammar so atrocious I felt I needed to leave scene of someone else's crime. I stepped out and into the bar at the new Bobby Van's Grill for a half-hearted attempt at getting satiated and satisfied in one fell swoop. My previous experiences there had left me saddened as their sisters (15th Street in DC, and Park Avenue in NYC) have left quite the large big-girl heels to fill. Bobby Van's Steakhouses are decidedly different and their newer, grill-style canteen had the potential to offer a glimpse at their culinary prowess while still not making me cower at the thought of a $45 steak for lunch. While I'm not sure which was worse: the thought of reviewing the cuisine at McDonald's on 12th for the rest of the week due to budgetary constraints or the notion that I would have to return to half-a-days work after devouring a 23-ounce porterhouse, but both make me cringe with horror only the image of a homicidal maniac misrepresenting a Salinger novel could previously conjure.

I ordered the open face steak sandwich. To my exquisite surprise a luscious cliff of perfectly cooked medium-rare (adjustable for those of you that prefer your meat a bit more tortured) steak emerged atop half of a seasoned baguette with a Madeira mushroom sauce so savory I would bathe in it if socially/hygienically acceptable. The steak was so gloriously tender, and the flavor so rich as the jus and the sauce mingled aloft the buttered/seasoned roll to make quite the operetta for the palette.

Also, it came with fries! I begged the generous barkeep, bearer of my salvation (a.k.a lunch) for more mushroom sauce...the fries, surely they must not be condemned to death by ketchup, they shall leave this world coated beautifully with the sauce if I have any say. The Shroud of Turin the little Idahoan martyrs deserve.

I was hungry, and now I am again.